Simply access the computer with your mind and initialise a process with defined parameters to solve it.
Perhaps that would work in the initial stages, but it seems to me that if you keep your body unenhanced then pretty soon it'll the weak link in the chain and it'll be holding back the mechanical/electronic components of the overall system. At that point comes the choice: stay retro and unavoidably retarded, or continue the process of gradual drift away from protoplasmic dependency.
Re Ian M Banks, I have all his novels including the Culture series, and I think they're great. However, why do you call that a utopia? In many ways, Mankind there is a pet of the machines, well looked after but largely ignored.
The biological vs mechanical/electronic question just doesn't make any sense -- it's a foregone conclusion.
The human race is undergoing a process of mechanisation right now, and it'll only accelerate as the technology allows it. In addition to the tech with which we adorn our bodies (and this is gradually integrating into us), we currently also implant a large variety of mechanical items to replace our worn out biological bits, and the trend is unstoppable: nobody wants to die because of a worn out body part, so as people live longer and as more components become available, it's quite clear where this is leading.
But this process will really take off when it comes to mental and perceptive facilities, because here we have no choice: as machine intelligence starts to rival ours and then begins to surpass it, either we integrate this capability into our own bodies or else we will no longer be the dominant intelligence on this planet. And that we cannot possibly countenance.
The future of our species is a mechanical/electronic one. Except maybe for those who want to be mere biological retro pets in the menagerie of machine intelligences.
I think you're missing a key point: why should the government be allowed to enact hilariously idiotic legislation riddled with technical flaws and to quite patently ignore our human rights as given by ECHR?
You seem to think that just because the legislation is unenforceable, that's OK. Why? Don't you believe that people who are trusted to govern our country should be expected to go about their business in a competent way and to generate legislation in which we can be proud, rather than a foul smelling heap of rubbish?
I just can't understand your complacency. You're letting them get away with utter incompetence and total disregard for the views of the people they govern, and to ignore with impunity the opinions of those who are far more technically competent than they are.
After all, where would UNIX be today if there hadn't been a VAX-11/780 around just daring someone to port UNIX to it?
Unix would probably have done just fine without the appearance of the VAX, because it was already running on PDP-11/34 and higher models prior to that, in Versions 6 and 7 towards the end of the 70's. What might never have been born without the VAX is BSD Unix, which led the way towards fully paged VMs (V7 just swapped whole segments).
However, there's no doubt that the competition from Berkeley made sure that AT&T kept improving V7 in order not to lag behind BSD, and so System 3 and System V became great systems largely as a result of the existence of the VAX as the platform for BSD development.
This was the start of Free Software in the operating system area: the upstart Berkeley community started from nothing (well, I guess they eyeballed V7) and then rapidly overtook the proprietary "official Unix" from AT&T. However, AT&T weren't the evil empire, because their source code was freely available to universities and was hacked into numerous different versions. So, right from the start of the 80's, there were already a lot of competing versions of Unix, and BSD on VAXen made the whole scene even more exciting.
Great days, very similar to today's emergence of Linux, with the big difference that there weren't any non-techies around getting in everyone's hair. Everyone in the community was a hacker, and those outside it simply weren't aware of what was going on at all.
... isn't just that it's already roughly as good as MP3 on quality and better on compression, but that it can continue to be developed freely until it's much, much better in the future.
Much has been made of the fact that it's free of the MP3 patent problems, but it gains in another way as well: freedom from the inertia and politics of standards committees, and freedom to depart from a single key idea or solution (MP3 is inherently a straightjacket). This pretty much guarantees that its development will proceed at a much faster pace than multi-corporate commercial developments in the same area, as long as its main proponents don't abandon it for a few years.
With that proviso, it seems to me that these inherent advantages put it in a very strong position similar to that of open-source operating systems versus their closed counterparts.
Imagine this scenario: I'm off for a weekend's rock climbing, loaded up with just the essentials, ie. as close to nothing as possible.
Carrying the kitchen sink while inching up a cliff face not only slows you down, it reduces your life expectancy. So, I don't want to lug around a cellphone, GPS, PDA, cash, credit cards, organ donor card, maps, compass, pen, torch, radio, or altimeter (:-).
Instead, I slap a couple of DataPatches on my arms and one on my forehead; they look kinda like bandaids. The one on my forehead provides most of the clever stuff: not only a useful amount of computing power, but also micropower transmissions to the dumb receptors I've had implanted in my retinal and ear nerve stems. Triggered by blink codes, I get all the info I need superimposed on my regular vision. I suppose this is a descendent of those crappy old head-up displays.
The DataPatches on my arms do the brute force work, as there's a large amount of excess energy on the surface of muscles that's easy to tap. Body data is gathered both locally and from the forehead patch transmissions, and external data is gathered from GPS and terrestrial radio transponders. This is all available to me on my A/V channels, but in addition, the arm patches store up power for occasional long-distance data bursts with the help of additional power-pump amplifiers in the heels of my shoes. As a result, I'm not only safer by being better informed, I'm also safer because my progress monitor a thousand miles away at home is keeping tabs on how I'm doing. And should something unfortunate happen, well, it knows what to do.
Now then, where is the "not good" in that scenario? There is none, because I'm in control of the technology, not somebody else. It's working for me, extending my control over the environment, helping me to survive and to have fun.
The problem isn't technology, but the people that might use it to gain power over you. That has always been the case and I guess it'll always be so, but that's not a reason for labelling technology as "bad". In that direction lies Luddism. Take it further and it's the end of Man's progress towards the stars.
Why bother with Linux- or *BSD-specific games anyway? Surely it's neither in the games manufacturer's interest to have to create special versions nor in the user's interest to have to wait (and wait and wait) for special versions to come out, if ever.
Shouldn't we be looking for some means of running games intended for Winblows platforms directly on our Linux and *BSD machines? That's how the problem should be addressed: do the work once, and benefit from it thousands of times over.
Of course, that's easier said than done with M$ moving the goalposts regularly, but surely it's not impossible. After all, they can't move the goalposts too far otherwise the games binaries won't work even on their own platform.
Premise of article is utterly false
on
A Praise To Unix
·
· Score: 4
But Unix still has value that the Linux crowd may vastly underestimate in its haste to issue a death certificate.
What a total waste of electrons, both in the alleged view of the "Linux crowd" and consequently also in the article.
Repeat after me, 10 billion times: "Linux is a Unix".
Who cares a damn about the legal niceties (more like idiocies) that prevent one from using the label "Unix" where it's obviously appropriate. Ask any person with more than a little experience of Unix and you'll always get the same answer: Linux and the BSDs are all Unixes, through and through, every bit as much as the licensed proprietary versions. It's not just by accident either, it's by design. And in many ways (but not all, yet) they're the best Unixes around, with the older "legal" Unixes fighting hard to keep up. Anyone that thinks that the important thing about a "Unix" is its license is just so uninformed that it's sad.
OK, I know it's summer and good news is hard to come by, but that article was about as empty of point and content as they come.
The shows on your local access channel are not substantially different to the normal sanitized rubbish common to all licenced TV but often lack even the minimal saving grace of reasonable production values.
Yes, we'll get that stuff too, and who can blame us for not being interested. However, the menu is likely to be far more varied:
- Films, including pr0n in huge quantities.
- Music videos, multimedia form of Internet radio.
- Rebroadcasts of the best bits of licenced TV.
- Artists' own "official" multimedia sites.
- Every man and his dogs' full-video webcams.
- The video equivalent of today static websites.
Expect the first and last of these to be especially big, the first because everybody seems to love films and pr0n, and the last because you can bet your bottom dollar that some video killer application will appear as soon as bandwidth allows. And there will be orders of magnitude more of all of this than on licenced TV, which means that despite most of it being rubbish, the majority of people are likely to find a tiny fraction that meets their own particular tastes. And the sons-of-TiVo will make it easy to find too.
TV broadcasters have much more to worry about than mere retransmission of their material over the Internet. You see, unlike the case with the RIAA, the TV broadcasters may find that their own product gets relegated to minority status, simply because of its regulated and sanitized nature.
If we look at how Internet radio has taken off, with literally thousands of one-man "broadcasters" being "on the air" at any given time, it's pretty darn inevitable that when high-rate DSL arrives and as video compression improves, Internet TV will become just as popular.
In fact, it's bound to be vastly more popular than Internet radio because of its potential for showing sex and nudity. Audio-only pr0n doesn't have quite the same impact as the visual variety, so once bandwidth allows, the floodgates of Internet broadcasting will really open.
And then how will the official broadcast material fair, in competition against the easy availability of hardcore in the comfort of one's own home? With 90% of TV content being unmitigated rubbish at the best of times, it's hard to see how official TV broadcasters are going to maintain much of an audience except at family viewing time.
They're free to block direct access of course... and to suffer the consequences, namely loss of page hits from those that don't want to be led by the nose.
The Internet is a buyer's market, and sellers that haven't yet learned that lesson by observation are doomed to learn it in more painful ways.
WIPO has jurisdiction in exactly the same way as a mugger has jurisdiction over your wallet when he's pointing a gun at you.
The government, big business, the judicial system and law enforcement are basically all one big protection racket enforced at the point of a gun, and they dish out legal jurisdiction as suits them.
Moral jurisdiction is a different matter of course, but you have to pay lip service to the immoral but legal kind occasionally if you want to retain your freedom. I don't see it changing any time soon.
In that case, the private citizen is a dead duck, because no matter how well one might organize a counter pressure group, there never will be the kind of money available to fund a permanent legal presence in Washington to counter-balance the well-funded lawyers of big business.
Corporatism has well and truly killed off democracy it seems.
Or maybe we should blame not the corporations but the lawyers instead. They must clearly understand how the role of government as protector of the citizenry is being undermined by their actions, yet they still do it.
"... it looks like the RIAA is now ready to recommend to Congress that the revision be stricken from the books by the end of the year."
Isn't anyone bothered by the fact that the RIAA is in a position to recommend such things to Congress? It makes the government look like a corporatist puppet without a mind of its own and without any pretence of representing the wishes of non-corporate citizens. Are things really that bad?
So, you never exceed the speed limit because that would be illegal, right? Yeah, right. In reality, questionable laws don't get respected and don't get obeyed by anyone except sheep who are unable to distinguish right from wrong.
Any argument based on a statement of "this is illegal" is basically not a logical argument at all, but an appeal to authority. And "violating the publisher's/author's rights" is no better -- it presuposes that the case for rights is a priori granted or obvious, which may not be the case.
Here in particular such reasoning makes no sense whatsoever, because the very concept of intellectual prioperty is being re-examined in the light of the new realities of unlimited distribution and sharing on the net. What the law established in pre-Internet days is not necessarily right in today's world, any more than Victorian laws regarding horse-powered transport are right on today's highways. The law either adapts rapidly or it gets ignored.
Your write: It's not atypical for the *cover art* to be a very significant chunk of this.
Er... Take one box of crayons and one notepad, and start drawing. Everybody has enough creativity for that, and there's no shortage of examples if you need some.
For goodness sake, disentangle yourself from the standard production machine! If you're using a cover artist to create your cover art, and a recording technician to do your recording, and backing singers/musicians to do your backing, and a mastering outfit to do the mastering, and a producer to produce the whole kaboodle, then it's not really your album at all!
A professional album costs upwards of $100,000 to record.
You've been taken in by the studio hype.
A $100K production package is entirely unnecessary. Quality writers, vocalists and musicians have been creating top quality music at near zero cost for millenia, and they haven't suddenly lost that ability now that 1000-track, billion-dollar digital studios are available. This applies even in totally electronic genres --- the keyboard/MIDI scene is so incredibly buoyant and rapidly churning that the kind of equipment that would have set you back dozens of thousands of pounds just 5 years ago is available at near-student prices now, and that's not just your instruments but the whole production outfit.
Your argument is basically back to front. The industry has created an expensive production and hype machine and uses this as an excuse for keeping prices high, as if using that environment were some sort of precondition for creating music. It isn't. If you buy into that standard MO then all you're doing is feeding the already-overfed beast.
If you have any intention of selling really lots of those units, you need to change your bootup, loading and configuration procedure rather drastically to:
STEP 1: Connect unit to LAN through RJ45, apply power.
STEP 2: Unit discovers all local networking parameters by snooping, configures itself as a webserver on an unused address of the subnet (snoop to see its advertisement), and everything else is configured up through a browser.
STEP 3: There is no step 3, because *everything* should be programmable in step 2, including uploading kernels to onboard flash.
Yes, I know that the reason PC-104 cards tend to be as dumb and old-fashioned as they were 5 years ago is because in theory every extra facility adds a fractional cost to the product, but I can't help feel that the accountants aren't factoring in the cost of people's time, nor the likelihood of increased sales if the item is massively easy to use.
Admittedly this applies only to tar'd source packages, but the autoconf system already allows you to structure your system that way: for a package foo, just configure it with
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/foo
and then after the "make install" go to/usr/local/foo/bin and run
for FILE in *; do ln -s `pwd`/$FILE/usr/local/bin/$FILE; done
If the package provides dynamic libraries they you also need to change/etc/ld.so.conf, and if it provides man pages then ditto for/etc/man.config, but it's no great hardship.
Does this mean that the Crusoe-based products that we were made to think are currently in the latter stages of production are in fact not, since only now are the details of production being arranged?
Or does it mean that the Crusoe-based products that are in the latter stages of production are not based on mass-produced Crusoe processes, but on (expensive) non-mass-produced ones instead?
Neither alternative sounds very promising. Is there another?
A built-in MP3 player doesn't just mean that you can listen to music in math or science class, it has more formal uses as well, especially in tutorials.
The most likely tutorial application will probably be in natural language courses, but there is an even more appropriate one for which calculation and sound are necessary partners: computer music + sound sythesis design and performance. It's a mathematical subject that benefits greatly from graphic representation and obviously requires sound as well. This new HP sounds like an ideal portable tool for studies in this area.
If your question was genuine and you seriously think that we are anywhere near to reaching practical limits on physical merging of appliances then you badly need to spend a few months reading something about nanotechnology, its near-term impact on molecular manufacturing, some wonderfully readable and seminal insight on where it might lead, and if you want more depth, a key text book in this area.
We are on rung 1 of a ladder that extends into infinity. The idea that somebody on a nerd forum could ask a question even suggesting that today's primitive toys are anywhere within a million light years of effective limits in any respect whatsoever is mind-boggling.
People here are in for a rude awakening sometime soon, I reckon, because on the one hand they want to ignore the "bad" copyright held on music by the studios, and on the other hand they want "good" copyright law to be strong to protect the GPL and other similar licenses.
I don't think that's going to work out.
The whole apparatus of IP, copyrights, patents and trademarks is proving to be less and less viable as worldwide networking becomes all-pervasive, as available bandwidths rise and as the media converge with the Internet to provide everyone with access to everything without legal nor corporate controls.
That won't stop (short of a global police state), so we might as well bite the bullet: so-called "Intellectual Property" is dead, at least in the sense of being a commercial asset with a price tag, and destined for burial along with it are all the other bits of legal nonsense invented by lawyers with excess time on their hands. We're well on our way down the road towards global recognition that once information of any kind enters the public arena, it is thereafter totally public with no strings attached. The supporters of yesterday's worldview will just have to adjust.
As for the GPL, it wouldn't make much sense without copyright law, but I don't really think that would matter much. Our commmunity is bound together with informal bonds that are much stronger than the legal bonds of the GPL, which really is just symbolic for us. The community has strength in depth within itself, not merely strength because of the luke-warm support of lawyers and judges. I venture that the community will survive the loss of IP and copyrights and the other related nonsenses regardless of what happens on the legal front.
This Ask Slashdot may be looking for a very rare beast: a commercial company that is not in it for the money.
Perhaps there are a few cooperatives or artistic partnerships that have that property, but in general a "label" that seeks out musical talent for marketing has only one driving force, and that's to make money for its private or public shareholders. That cannot fail but make them all "bad" to a lesser or greater degree.
The only sure way of avoiding the key problem of conflict of interest between label and artist is to stick to labels that are wholly owned by and restricted to a single band.
Fortunately we're seeing more and more of those, often associated with the band's website and providing both MP3 tracks as publicity and CDs and merchandise for fans to buy. The great thing about this approach is of course that the band gets 100% of all profits, and their artistic direction and all copyrights remain 100% in their own hands.
The best way of fighting the RIAA and supporting the artists at the same time is to encourage the trend towards band own labels. Provide them with ready package deals at fixed cost (don't take a cut, or you'll become a vile label, inevitably) --- I bet that there are hundreds of thousands of bands that aren't interested in the standard chart fair beloved by studios, yet are ready to take a small leap into the unknown as their own masters.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply access the computer with your mind and initialise a process with defined parameters to solve it.
Perhaps that would work in the initial stages, but it seems to me that if you keep your body unenhanced then pretty soon it'll the weak link in the chain and it'll be holding back the mechanical/electronic components of the overall system. At that point comes the choice: stay retro and unavoidably retarded, or continue the process of gradual drift away from protoplasmic dependency.
Re Ian M Banks, I have all his novels including the Culture series, and I think they're great. However, why do you call that a utopia? In many ways, Mankind there is a pet of the machines, well looked after but largely ignored.
The biological vs mechanical/electronic question just doesn't make any sense -- it's a foregone conclusion.
The human race is undergoing a process of mechanisation right now, and it'll only accelerate as the technology allows it. In addition to the tech with which we adorn our bodies (and this is gradually integrating into us), we currently also implant a large variety of mechanical items to replace our worn out biological bits, and the trend is unstoppable: nobody wants to die because of a worn out body part, so as people live longer and as more components become available, it's quite clear where this is leading.
But this process will really take off when it comes to mental and perceptive facilities, because here we have no choice: as machine intelligence starts to rival ours and then begins to surpass it, either we integrate this capability into our own bodies or else we will no longer be the dominant intelligence on this planet. And that we cannot possibly countenance.
The future of our species is a mechanical/electronic one. Except maybe for those who want to be mere biological retro pets in the menagerie of machine intelligences.
I think you're missing a key point: why should the government be allowed to enact hilariously idiotic legislation riddled with technical flaws and to quite patently ignore our human rights as given by ECHR?
You seem to think that just because the legislation is unenforceable, that's OK. Why? Don't you believe that people who are trusted to govern our country should be expected to go about their business in a competent way and to generate legislation in which we can be proud, rather than a foul smelling heap of rubbish?
I just can't understand your complacency. You're letting them get away with utter incompetence and total disregard for the views of the people they govern, and to ignore with impunity the opinions of those who are far more technically competent than they are.
After all, where would UNIX be today if there hadn't been a VAX-11/780 around just daring someone to port UNIX to it?
Unix would probably have done just fine without the appearance of the VAX, because it was already running on PDP-11/34 and higher models prior to that, in Versions 6 and 7 towards the end of the 70's. What might never have been born without the VAX is BSD Unix, which led the way towards fully paged VMs (V7 just swapped whole segments).
However, there's no doubt that the competition from Berkeley made sure that AT&T kept improving V7 in order not to lag behind BSD, and so System 3 and System V became great systems largely as a result of the existence of the VAX as the platform for BSD development.
This was the start of Free Software in the operating system area: the upstart Berkeley community started from nothing (well, I guess they eyeballed V7) and then rapidly overtook the proprietary "official Unix" from AT&T. However, AT&T weren't the evil empire, because their source code was freely available to universities and was hacked into numerous different versions. So, right from the start of the 80's, there were already a lot of competing versions of Unix, and BSD on VAXen made the whole scene even more exciting.
Great days, very similar to today's emergence of Linux, with the big difference that there weren't any non-techies around getting in everyone's hair. Everyone in the community was a hacker, and those outside it simply weren't aware of what was going on at all.
... isn't just that it's already roughly as good as MP3 on quality and better on compression, but that it can continue to be developed freely until it's much, much better in the future.
Much has been made of the fact that it's free of the MP3 patent problems, but it gains in another way as well: freedom from the inertia and politics of standards committees, and freedom to depart from a single key idea or solution (MP3 is inherently a straightjacket). This pretty much guarantees that its development will proceed at a much faster pace than multi-corporate commercial developments in the same area, as long as its main proponents don't abandon it for a few years.
With that proviso, it seems to me that these inherent advantages put it in a very strong position similar to that of open-source operating systems versus their closed counterparts.
Imagine this scenario: I'm off for a weekend's rock climbing, loaded up with just the essentials, ie. as close to nothing as possible.
Carrying the kitchen sink while inching up a cliff face not only slows you down, it reduces your life expectancy. So, I don't want to lug around a cellphone, GPS, PDA, cash, credit cards, organ donor card, maps, compass, pen, torch, radio, or altimeter (:-).
Instead, I slap a couple of DataPatches on my arms and one on my forehead; they look kinda like bandaids. The one on my forehead provides most of the clever stuff: not only a useful amount of computing power, but also micropower transmissions to the dumb receptors I've had implanted in my retinal and ear nerve stems. Triggered by blink codes, I get all the info I need superimposed on my regular vision. I suppose this is a descendent of those crappy old head-up displays.
The DataPatches on my arms do the brute force work, as there's a large amount of excess energy on the surface of muscles that's easy to tap. Body data is gathered both locally and from the forehead patch transmissions, and external data is gathered from GPS and terrestrial radio transponders. This is all available to me on my A/V channels, but in addition, the arm patches store up power for occasional long-distance data bursts with the help of additional power-pump amplifiers in the heels of my shoes. As a result, I'm not only safer by being better informed, I'm also safer because my progress monitor a thousand miles away at home is keeping tabs on how I'm doing. And should something unfortunate happen, well, it knows what to do.
Now then, where is the "not good" in that scenario? There is none, because I'm in control of the technology, not somebody else. It's working for me, extending my control over the environment, helping me to survive and to have fun.
The problem isn't technology, but the people that might use it to gain power over you. That has always been the case and I guess it'll always be so, but that's not a reason for labelling technology as "bad". In that direction lies Luddism. Take it further and it's the end of Man's progress towards the stars.
Why bother with Linux- or *BSD-specific games anyway? Surely it's neither in the games manufacturer's interest to have to create special versions nor in the user's interest to have to wait (and wait and wait) for special versions to come out, if ever.
Shouldn't we be looking for some means of running games intended for Winblows platforms directly on our Linux and *BSD machines? That's how the problem should be addressed: do the work once, and benefit from it thousands of times over.
Of course, that's easier said than done with M$ moving the goalposts regularly, but surely it's not impossible. After all, they can't move the goalposts too far otherwise the games binaries won't work even on their own platform.
But Unix still has value that the Linux crowd may vastly underestimate in its haste to issue a death certificate.
What a total waste of electrons, both in the alleged view of the "Linux crowd" and consequently also in the article.
Repeat after me, 10 billion times: "Linux is a Unix".
Who cares a damn about the legal niceties (more like idiocies) that prevent one from using the label "Unix" where it's obviously appropriate. Ask any person with more than a little experience of Unix and you'll always get the same answer: Linux and the BSDs are all Unixes, through and through, every bit as much as the licensed proprietary versions. It's not just by accident either, it's by design. And in many ways (but not all, yet) they're the best Unixes around, with the older "legal" Unixes fighting hard to keep up. Anyone that thinks that the important thing about a "Unix" is its license is just so uninformed that it's sad.
OK, I know it's summer and good news is hard to come by, but that article was about as empty of point and content as they come.
The shows on your local access channel are not substantially different to the normal sanitized rubbish common to all licenced TV but often lack even the minimal saving grace of reasonable production values.
Yes, we'll get that stuff too, and who can blame us for not being interested. However, the menu is likely to be far more varied:
- Films, including pr0n in huge quantities.
- Music videos, multimedia form of Internet radio.
- Rebroadcasts of the best bits of licenced TV.
- Artists' own "official" multimedia sites.
- Every man and his dogs' full-video webcams.
- The video equivalent of today static websites.
Expect the first and last of these to be especially big, the first because everybody seems to love films and pr0n, and the last because you can bet your bottom dollar that some video killer application will appear as soon as bandwidth allows. And there will be orders of magnitude more of all of this than on licenced TV, which means that despite most of it being rubbish, the majority of people are likely to find a tiny fraction that meets their own particular tastes. And the sons-of-TiVo will make it easy to find too.
TV broadcasters have much more to worry about than mere retransmission of their material over the Internet. You see, unlike the case with the RIAA, the TV broadcasters may find that their own product gets relegated to minority status, simply because of its regulated and sanitized nature.
If we look at how Internet radio has taken off, with literally thousands of one-man "broadcasters" being "on the air" at any given time, it's pretty darn inevitable that when high-rate DSL arrives and as video compression improves, Internet TV will become just as popular.
In fact, it's bound to be vastly more popular than Internet radio because of its potential for showing sex and nudity. Audio-only pr0n doesn't have quite the same impact as the visual variety, so once bandwidth allows, the floodgates of Internet broadcasting will really open.
And then how will the official broadcast material fair, in competition against the easy availability of hardcore in the comfort of one's own home? With 90% of TV content being unmitigated rubbish at the best of times, it's hard to see how official TV broadcasters are going to maintain much of an audience except at family viewing time.
They're free to block direct access of course ... and to suffer the consequences, namely loss of page hits from those that don't want to be led by the nose.
The Internet is a buyer's market, and sellers that haven't yet learned that lesson by observation are doomed to learn it in more painful ways.
WIPO has jurisdiction in exactly the same way as a mugger has jurisdiction over your wallet when he's pointing a gun at you.
The government, big business, the judicial system and law enforcement are basically all one big protection racket enforced at the point of a gun, and they dish out legal jurisdiction as suits them.
Moral jurisdiction is a different matter of course, but you have to pay lip service to the immoral but legal kind occasionally if you want to retain your freedom. I don't see it changing any time soon.
In that case, the private citizen is a dead duck, because no matter how well one might organize a counter pressure group, there never will be the kind of money available to fund a permanent legal presence in Washington to counter-balance the well-funded lawyers of big business.
Corporatism has well and truly killed off democracy it seems.
Or maybe we should blame not the corporations but the lawyers instead. They must clearly understand how the role of government as protector of the citizenry is being undermined by their actions, yet they still do it.
"... it looks like the RIAA is now ready to recommend to Congress that the revision be stricken from the books by the end of the year."
Isn't anyone bothered by the fact that the RIAA is in a position to recommend such things to Congress? It makes the government look like a corporatist puppet without a mind of its own and without any pretence of representing the wishes of non-corporate citizens. Are things really that bad?
You write: this is illegal.
So, you never exceed the speed limit because that would be illegal, right? Yeah, right. In reality, questionable laws don't get respected and don't get obeyed by anyone except sheep who are unable to distinguish right from wrong.
Any argument based on a statement of "this is illegal" is basically not a logical argument at all, but an appeal to authority. And "violating the publisher's/author's rights" is no better -- it presuposes that the case for rights is a priori granted or obvious, which may not be the case.
Here in particular such reasoning makes no sense whatsoever, because the very concept of intellectual prioperty is being re-examined in the light of the new realities of unlimited distribution and sharing on the net. What the law established in pre-Internet days is not necessarily right in today's world, any more than Victorian laws regarding horse-powered transport are right on today's highways. The law either adapts rapidly or it gets ignored.
Oh heck, I wish I hadn't.
:-)
I'm feeling very, very afraid.
Your write: It's not atypical for the *cover art* to be a very significant chunk of this.
... Take one box of crayons and one notepad, and start drawing. Everybody has enough creativity for that, and there's no shortage of examples if you need some.
Er
For goodness sake, disentangle yourself from the standard production machine! If you're using a cover artist to create your cover art, and a recording technician to do your recording, and backing singers/musicians to do your backing, and a mastering outfit to do the mastering, and a producer to produce the whole kaboodle, then it's not really your album at all!
A professional album costs upwards of $100,000 to record.
You've been taken in by the studio hype.
A $100K production package is entirely unnecessary. Quality writers, vocalists and musicians have been creating top quality music at near zero cost for millenia, and they haven't suddenly lost that ability now that 1000-track, billion-dollar digital studios are available. This applies even in totally electronic genres --- the keyboard/MIDI scene is so incredibly buoyant and rapidly churning that the kind of equipment that would have set you back dozens of thousands of pounds just 5 years ago is available at near-student prices now, and that's not just your instruments but the whole production outfit.
Your argument is basically back to front. The industry has created an expensive production and hype machine and uses this as an excuse for keeping prices high, as if using that environment were some sort of precondition for creating music. It isn't. If you buy into that standard MO then all you're doing is feeding the already-overfed beast.
If you have any intention of selling really lots of those units, you need to change your bootup, loading and configuration procedure rather drastically to:
STEP 1: Connect unit to LAN through RJ45, apply power.
STEP 2: Unit discovers all local networking parameters by snooping, configures itself as a webserver on an unused address of the subnet (snoop to see its advertisement), and everything else is configured up through a browser.
STEP 3: There is no step 3, because *everything* should be programmable in step 2, including uploading kernels to onboard flash.
Yes, I know that the reason PC-104 cards tend to be as dumb and old-fashioned as they were 5 years ago is because in theory every extra facility adds a fractional cost to the product, but I can't help feel that the accountants aren't factoring in the cost of people's time, nor the likelihood of increased sales if the item is massively easy to use.
Admittedly this applies only to tar'd source packages, but the autoconf system already allows you to structure your system that way: for a package foo, just configure it with
/usr/local/foo/bin and run
/usr/local/bin/$FILE; done
/etc/ld.so.conf, and if it provides man pages then ditto for /etc/man.config, but it's no great hardship.
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/foo
and then after the "make install" go to
for FILE in *; do ln -s `pwd`/$FILE
If the package provides dynamic libraries they you also need to change
Does this mean that the Crusoe-based products that we were made to think are currently in the latter stages of production are in fact not, since only now are the details of production being arranged?
Or does it mean that the Crusoe-based products that are in the latter stages of production are not based on mass-produced Crusoe processes, but on (expensive) non-mass-produced ones instead?
Neither alternative sounds very promising. Is there another?
A built-in MP3 player doesn't just mean that you can listen to music in math or science class, it has more formal uses as well, especially in tutorials.
The most likely tutorial application will probably be in natural language courses, but there is an even more appropriate one for which calculation and sound are necessary partners: computer music + sound sythesis design and performance. It's a mathematical subject that benefits greatly from graphic representation and obviously requires sound as well. This new HP sounds like an ideal portable tool for studies in this area.
If your question was genuine and you seriously think that we are anywhere near to reaching practical limits on physical merging of appliances then you badly need to spend a few months reading something about nanotechnology, its near-term impact on molecular manufacturing, some wonderfully readable and seminal insight on where it might lead, and if you want more depth, a key text book in this area.
We are on rung 1 of a ladder that extends into infinity. The idea that somebody on a nerd forum could ask a question even suggesting that today's primitive toys are anywhere within a million light years of effective limits in any respect whatsoever is mind-boggling.
People here are in for a rude awakening sometime soon, I reckon, because on the one hand they want to ignore the "bad" copyright held on music by the studios, and on the other hand they want "good" copyright law to be strong to protect the GPL and other similar licenses.
I don't think that's going to work out.
The whole apparatus of IP, copyrights, patents and trademarks is proving to be less and less viable as worldwide networking becomes all-pervasive, as available bandwidths rise and as the media converge with the Internet to provide everyone with access to everything without legal nor corporate controls.
That won't stop (short of a global police state), so we might as well bite the bullet: so-called "Intellectual Property" is dead, at least in the sense of being a commercial asset with a price tag, and destined for burial along with it are all the other bits of legal nonsense invented by lawyers with excess time on their hands. We're well on our way down the road towards global recognition that once information of any kind enters the public arena, it is thereafter totally public with no strings attached. The supporters of yesterday's worldview will just have to adjust.
As for the GPL, it wouldn't make much sense without copyright law, but I don't really think that would matter much. Our commmunity is bound together with informal bonds that are much stronger than the legal bonds of the GPL, which really is just symbolic for us. The community has strength in depth within itself, not merely strength because of the luke-warm support of lawyers and judges. I venture that the community will survive the loss of IP and copyrights and the other related nonsenses regardless of what happens on the legal front.
This Ask Slashdot may be looking for a very rare beast: a commercial company that is not in it for the money.
Perhaps there are a few cooperatives or artistic partnerships that have that property, but in general a "label" that seeks out musical talent for marketing has only one driving force, and that's to make money for its private or public shareholders. That cannot fail but make them all "bad" to a lesser or greater degree.
The only sure way of avoiding the key problem of conflict of interest between label and artist is to stick to labels that are wholly owned by and restricted to a single band.
Fortunately we're seeing more and more of those, often associated with the band's website and providing both MP3 tracks as publicity and CDs and merchandise for fans to buy. The great thing about this approach is of course that the band gets 100% of all profits, and their artistic direction and all copyrights remain 100% in their own hands.
The best way of fighting the RIAA and supporting the artists at the same time is to encourage the trend towards band own labels. Provide them with ready package deals at fixed cost (don't take a cut, or you'll become a vile label, inevitably) --- I bet that there are hundreds of thousands of bands that aren't interested in the standard chart fair beloved by studios, yet are ready to take a small leap into the unknown as their own masters.